The Nupe kingdom (Nupeland, in the middle Niger valley of present-day Niger, Kwara and Kogi States) was founded according to tradition by Tsoede (also called Edegi), a prince of the Beni dynasty who was sent across the Niger as a slave to the Attah of Idah, escaped with a bronze trumpet and a war-canoe, and established his capital at Nupeko (later moved to Gbara and ultimately to Bida) c.1400. The first historical Etsu Nupe is dated to the mid-15th century.
The Nupe were master metallurgists and weavers. The brass-work of Bida — particularly the engraved trays and the great brass trumpets used at the Etsu's installation — supplied the courts of Oyo, Borgu and Kanem-Borno. Bida cloth (akotogi), a heavy hand-woven men's gown of indigo cotton with silk embroidery, was traded across the Western Sudan as a luxury item. The capital Bida — relocated from Raba by the Etsu Masaba in 1859 — became a major centre after the Fulani jihad.
The Sokoto Caliphate's southern expansion reached Nupeland in 1810 when Mallam Dendo, a Fulani cleric from Borno, became the spiritual adviser to Etsu Majiya II and then displaced him. Mallam Dendo's son Usman Zaki became the first Fulani Etsu in 1841, and Bida emerged as the new capital under Etsu Masaba (r. 1859–1873) as one of the southern emirates of the Caliphate. The Bida emirate raided the Gwari, Kakanda, Bassa-Nge and Kaduna valley pagans for slaves on a vast scale through the 1880s.
The Royal Niger Company under Sir George Goldie defeated Etsu Abubakar of Bida at the Battle of Bida on 27 January 1897, in the same campaign that crushed the Emirate of Ilorin a week later. The Etsu retained ceremonial authority under British indirect rule. The reigning Etsu Nupe is HRH Yahaya Abubakar (installed 2003), a retired Brigadier-General and former Nigerian military attaché to Washington.
The Nupe contribution to Nigerian intellectual life includes the anthropologist S.F. Nadel — whose 1942 ethnography A Black Byzantium remains a classical study of an African state — and a long line of senior civil servants and military officers (including the late General Mamman Vatsa, executed 1986).